From: Dan Reiter and Adam Berinsky, editors-in-chief
This post describes a policy change for Conflict of Interest (COI) policies pertaining to potential reviewers of manuscripts submitted to AJPS.
COI policies for AJPS are described on this webpage (https://ajps.org/conflict-of-interest-policy/), and currently include the following text:
“Nature of Conflicts Relevant to this Policy. Not all conflicts of interest are prohibited or harmful to the MPSA. The association recognizes that our association, disciplines, and scholarly communities are relatively small, with potentially complex (collegial or competitive) relationships. However, the following professional or personal relationships between authors and editors are conflicts of interest that are prohibited:
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- current or former dissertation committee chair or committee member (ever)
- current colleagues at the same institution
- current professional research, teaching or funding collaborators
- current or former spouses or partners”
Regarding former coauthors, AJPS declares coauthors from the last five years as having a COI.
This policy is beginning to generate difficulties for the review process. Scholars are beginning to write in ever-larger teams of coauthors. In a recent extreme case, a coauthor on a submitted manuscript is a coauthor on another paper with 161 coauthors. More commonly, we are now increasingly receiving manuscripts which list dozens of scholars who are ineligible to serve as reviewers because of current COI policies. This problem is exacerbated when a manuscript submitted to AJPS itself has multiple coauthors, because then all of those coauthors themselves have many past coauthors. All of these coauthors are currently listed as having COI, which then is narrowing the potential reviewer pool for a growing number of manuscripts.
The narrowing of the potential reviewer pool for a growing number of manuscripts slows down and reduces the quality of the review process. It slows down the process because it takes longer for the AJPS editorial staff to assemble a panel of three reviewers that do not have COIs with the manuscript authors. It reduces the quality of the review process because eliminating a larger set of potential coauthors means the editorial staff needs to reach out to scholars who are less likely to have familiarity with topic of the manuscript, and less likely to have strong scholarly reputations.
However, the general principle of avoiding COIs in the review process remains important. We must have reviewers that can evaluate a submitted manuscript objectively, without being affected by personal or professional ties that might distort the neutrality of their review.
With these considerations in mind, we have made the following change to current AJPS COI policies. To the above paragraph, we have added the following sentence:
“Potential reviewers who have coauthored with one of the manuscript authors within the past five years are considered to have a Conflict of Interest and are not eligible to review. An exception is if the coauthorship did not create a close professional relationship between the potential reviewer and the manuscript author. An example of coauthorship not creating a close professional relationship would be if the coauthoring team was large, the manuscript author and potential reviewer were not lead scholars on the project, and the manuscript author and potential reviewer had very little or no direct communication with each other. Note that even if coauthorship did not create a close professional relationship between the manuscript and potential reviewer, other factors may have created a COI, such as if the potential reviewer served as the dissertation advisor of the manuscript author. We leave to the discretion of the manuscript authors to determine when coauthorship did not create a close professional relationship.”
We believe that this approach maintains an appropriate balance between competing interests. This step should help reduce the number of scholars excluded from consideration as reviewers because of COI issues. Further, this policy will not significantly undermine the objectivity of the review process. In general, when there are large groups of coauthors on a manuscript, it is often the case that many of the coauthors have only loose ties with each other. They may work in different universities or even different countries, and may have not met or directly communicated with each other. Within these large groups, there may be a small number of project leaders and then a team of far-flung researchers, all of whom sometimes get classified as coauthors with COIs under the current rule. We believe that within any large set of coauthors, for any one single coauthor, there could be a smaller set of a coauthors with close professional relationships that should be classified as COIs. Other coauthors do not need to be classified as COIs. Note that if within the rest of the coauthor team there are individuals with whom the coauthor has other kinds of ties, such as spouses, dissertation advisers, or colleagues at the same institution, they will remain classified as having COIs independently of the rule change.